144898-shades-eve-event-quest-design-feedback
Content ---- ---- That's my biggest problem with questing in general. It seems really hard to strike a balance between encouraging participation and making the presence of other player characters a good thing mechanically. Err on one side, and people park their characters where the action is, and idly reap the rewards of other players doing the things. Err in the other direction and people resent encounters with other players as competition for limited resources. Had the little manipulable thingies been written so that they only despawn for the player who interacts with them, there could be fewer spawns spread farther apart, and there would be no competition for quest resources. Requiring individual interaction was enough to stop the leech factor. Maybe their current function is due to a coding limitation? | |} ---- ---- Thanks for such a detailed response, it helps us to understand the reasons why certain things are handled as they are. A few responses: The Gotta Getta Geist public event is definitely not visible enough. I wasn't even aware of it and I've been doing all the Shade's Eve content I could find. Perhaps add a breadcrumb quest for this in Thayd / Ilium that directs players where to go the first time? Better still, a portal mechanism similar to the Hoverboard event to get players there quickly (when it's active of course) and back. I can understand that the bulk of the dailies were put in the cities to increase accessibility. But the paradox is that the increased lag this causes actually decreases accessibility and lowers the enjoyment of the event for many players. Using the cities as a hub and then sending players off via portals (again, the Hoverboard event does this well) would help distribute the load a bit. Whilst having lots of other players around is what you want in a MMO, this only holds true of the game engine / servers can handle it. If they can't you need to reel in ambition a bit and be pragmatic. Some of the quests could definitely benefit from faster respawns, but perhaps a better solution is to add a few more areas where these dailies can be completed, again to split the players up more and spread the burden. Then those who don't mind a little bit of travelling for a more hassle-free quest would have some options. Public quests can work. Obviously there's an issue with not rewarding afk'ers and making sure genuine contributors get rewarded, but those problems are not intractable. Certain other MMOs have got this right. It just needs the public quests to be made suitable for frequent repeats (rather than hourly), scale with numbers involved and have rewards tiered based on contribution. There will still be some competition to contribute the most, but that's generally a lot more healthy than 'objective stealing'. | |} ---- That's what put me off about the daily quests. I got lucky today, me and my wife both logged in and she was in a separate shard. Mine was full, hers was empty. She invited me to her group, I synced and we got them done stress free. Now I know about that I can see why some people are having a better time of it than others. Usually i'm stressed as hell and give up, this time I got lucky with the empty shard. I've found it's easier to farm the instance anyway. I've got no idea what the effigy is that we're building with the item we get from the daily quests but I doubt the payoff is going to be worth the irritation. | |} ---- ---- ---- I agree that cooperative gameplay is fantastic and that we should minimize the feel of having objectives stolen by others. That said, to reiterate my earlier point, balancing rewards would be considerably harder in this situation -- what you would likely see is significantly inflated prices on the vendors due to the capacity to get far more currency per day, thus leaving some folks who have considerably more limited time to play out in the cold. Again, we're not closed to feedback and I completely agree that the points of concern brought up should be addressed. However, you will likely not see the daily quests changed to public events due to the issues I listed above (and other more technical concerns.) | |} ---- If you could compile a list of everything that doesn't share credit, that would be very helpful! Things should share. | |} ---- Wait, the public event is already happening? I've spent enough time in the capital without it ever going off that I assumed it was tied to the giant effigy thing, that it couldn't happen until your side got to 25000 contribution or whatever. You could at least give us a "next event" countdown timer like the one at Star Comm Station! | |} ---- This is an important point you made here and it does not only apply to the holiday quests but also to a lot of quests. A while ago a friend and i each levelled a character to 50. My friend was new to Wildstar and he was super annoyed (i'm already used to it...) that we had to fight over so many quest objectives while being in a group. On the other hand, there are quests where each player contributes to the progress. So he was left a bit confused about questing although he likes the game (like me, still). So if these two behaviours, to fight over objectives or to contribute to the group progress, are intended, why not let the players choose in the group settings via vote? /vote objectivemode: fight|contribute | |} ---- ---- I think this is a big thing here.. I never understood why questing in group was never really consistent.. | |} ---- I wonder if they ever heard about that thing called "teamplay"... j/k :D But hey, there's that loading screen that says something like "Having trouble with challenges? Grab a friend to help you." - well, we know, that we'd be hatin' that friend after doing that challenge... please stop it! Edited October 22, 2015 by Smiley | |} ---- Mixing Mayhem is the only one I've run into so far in Shade's Eve, and there was definitely no group sharing. I accidentally stole 3 items from my gf before she said something and I realized. | |} ---- ---- ---- I don't know if Northern wastelands has changed in the meantime - haven't done that in a group for a while, but a lot of quests there didn't share. In Crimson Badlands on the other hand most did share afaik. Fun fact: the Exolab quest where you have to rescue the hostages does share, but you do have to fight with your own faction over the hostages, not with the enemy. WTF? (ok, i can understand lore-wise... but an empty platform is... empty!) Edited October 22, 2015 by Smiley | |} ---- ---- This is an issue of credit and loot distribution, and it's an important one to get right. I've seen a lot of games try to address it in a lot of different ways, but they tend to cluster around one of two extremes: either everyone gets the same prizes, which inspires many people to do the bare minimum risk and share equally in the reward, or the best prizes go to the top contributors and so those players who already have the best of everything dominate the event and nobody else even needs to bother with showing up. To my mind, they both fail because each decides to err on one side or the other rather than try to simultaneously acknowledge increased contribution and account for increased ability. I think it is possible to do both, and I'd like to suggest how to pull that off. World events in this game already do a pretty good job of tallying up damage, healing, tanking, and contribution to event goals like collecting widgets. What they need to do is compile all that information into a single score for each player. Total up all the scores from all the players and divide each player's score by that total. That gives you each player's fractional contribution (FC) to the total event. Rank all players according to their fractional contribution, then calculate the running total from smallest contribution to largest to generate a summed fractional contribution (SFC) as follows. Player FC SFC 1 0.29 1.00 2 0.21 0.71 3 0.17 0.50 4 0.12 0.33 5 0.07 0.21 6 0.04 0.14 7 0.04 0.10 8 0.03 0.06 9 0.02 0.03 10 0.01 0.01 Rank the loot for completing the event from most valuable to least valuable. Starting with the most valuable piece of loot, generate a random number between 0 and 1. The player who gets it is the one who has the closest number to that RNG roll that exceeds it--for example, if the RNG roll is 0.54, in the contribution table listed above player 2 would get the prize. That player now has their prize; remove them from the distribution table, remove their score from the total event score and recalculate FC and SFC for the remaining players based on the remaining total score. Generate a new random number between 0 and 1 for the next most valuable prize and repeat until all prizes have been distributed. The point of doing this is that everyone who contributes to the event has a chance of getting the top prizes, but the players who contribute most are credited for their contribution with higher odds of getting them. They don't exclude everyone else from having any chance at all just by showing up no matter how much better their gear or mad skillz are. Nobody with a non-zero contribution is ever completely guaranteed or completely excluded from anything, which means that your most effective route to the prize is to try as hard as you can and maximize your chances. Going AFK in the area makes your contribution tiny relative to people who are really trying, which reduces your odds of getting anything to levels comparable to winning a lottery even if you take a stray AoE or two along the way. I think this would work a lot better than the options this game has used so far in terms of balancing the competing incentives for individual contribution and collective participation. For what it's worth. Edited October 24, 2015 by yasfan | |} ----